To Inherit a War
by Kita-Ysabell
Summary: Nathaniel Rookwood writes a letter (albeit a very long one) to Harry, telling of his time at Hogwarts and trying to unravel the forces that shaped it: the volatile bond between parents and children, the cultural narrative of adventure, the conflict surrounding the Dark Lord's vie for power, and a troubling recurrence of victims who have become complicit in their own suffering.
1. Chapter 1

If you had asked me, on the Saturday before my eleventh birthday, who my father was, I'd have told you that it's very impolite to ask questions like that. If I'd been in a mood to make you feel bad about asking, I'd have told you the truth, insomuch as it was known to me: that my father was in a maximum security prison for having killed a lot of people or possibly some sort of treason. I never saw him. It wasn't allowed. My mother never turned up.

I lived with Griffith and Melissa, my guardians. Griffith worked in a drugstore pharmacy, and Melissa taught at the technical school. They live small but intricate lives filled with hopes and dreams and interests and opinions. They had no children of their own. They didn't seem to mind that there was a cuckoo in the nest, but they were never really much like family, even though I've lived with them as long as I can remember.

On Wednesday afternoons, I went to a support group for kids with parents in prison. It was some government thing, I think, based off some alarming statistic about how many crimes are committed by the children of criminals. Or maybe the guardians of kids with parents in prison wanted the kids to grow up like themselves instead of the kids' parents.

I always felt like I had a place in that group. We knew each other's scars. Sometimes someone would come or go—groups were sorted by age, and you don't have to be a certain age for your mother or father to get arrested.

And then the letter came, and I thought it was a joke at first, or an advertisement. I put it somewhere, and didn't do anything about it for a week, so the school sent Professor Flitwick. He showed up and tried to sell me on magic.

Have you ever felt like you were different, special even?

No. Hell no! Sure, I stuck out at school, but so did all of the kids like me. I had kids like me. I had my people.

Have you ever thought you were destined for something more?

Growing up with the children of cons, I saw the toll that delusions of grandeur could take. We learned to make a different account of the future.

Has anything unexplained ever happened to you?

I sometimes wonder if adults ever stand back and look at the world they make for children and realize how much of it doesn't make sense.

Have you ever wondered about your father?

That one got me.

It was a mistake. I knew it was a mistake. There were kids who still saw their parents, and I knew how it tore at them. They'd come back brittle, on edge, laughing at nothing and reciting promises of a future even they didn't believe in. It reminded them of how starved they were, because all kids really love their parents. All kids want to be loved by their parents.

But, as we learned collectively, all cons are cons. Con artists. No matter what they go in for, prison makes them that. And they do it to their kids. Con them, then let them down, again and again. It left marks I had learned to read.

"You see, the reason you haven't been able to see him isn't because of security. He's in a wizard prison, in Azkaban. You couldn't know, I'm afraid."

"Can I see him now?" I asked.

Professor Flitwick didn't even hesitate. "Yes. Yes, I think that can be arranged."

What an idiot. These sorts of things don't just happen, and there's a reason for that. How many people had to see that request and approve it, as it made its way through the Ministry? It was a mistake. I knew it was a mistake. But they apparently had no qualms about it.

All that was done to prepare me was to have Professor Flitwick give me the most sanitized possible account of my father's crimes.

"A while ago, you see, there was a man. A wizard. He wanted, well… he tried to take over Wizarding Britain. A lot of people died."

The way he said it, you could imagine a sudden increase of heart attacks that just happened to coincide with this man's vie for power.

"It was… a very difficult time. People don't like to call that man by name, still. Your father was accused of helping him."

"Was accused of." I have since heard Flitwick's shrill voice cry out for blood as if Blind Justice herself thirsted for it, but faced with Nathaniel Rookwood, the innocent son of the wizard most educated, bar none, in the Dark Arts, he could not even say that my father had done what he did.

And then, there I was, in Azkaban, in a visiting chamber that seemed to be hewn from the rock of the island itself. You've never been to Azkaban, have you? Just heard about it, second- and third-hand accounts that pale in comparison to the place itself.

Two fully-fledged Aurors watched our every move, his every move especially. At least someone, somewhere had been possessed of the presence of mind to realize that a boy of eleven, on first seeing his father, did not need the oppressive chill of Azkaban's other guards breathing down his neck, though they made themselves known through the stone walls.

You never met my father, did you?

My father, the Dark Lord's bookkeeper and researcher. My father, the spy. Well, the other spy. He always struck me as somewhat Italian, though I don't think he was. He was sharp and proud and fiercely intelligent. In a place that aged people a century in a day, he still didn't look nearly as old as he was, grey just touching the temples of his black hair.

He smiled when he saw me. There aren't many who could have smiled in that place, and the look in his eyes was hard and cold.

"So, Nathaniel," he said with that smile, all edges, still in his voice, "you've finally come home."

I knew him. I had always known him. I saw it the instant he spoke. All the mysterious packages from no one in particular, the books and puzzles, they must have been from him. He had shaped me into something, taught me a secret language, only I didn't know why yet. I never knew how he did it, only that he was good at sliding through Azkaban's loopholes.

He reached into his robes and the Aurors flinched. He drew out a book. Something like a journal, very ordinary, leather-bound. He slid it across the table and I fingered it cautiously.

"Consider it a birthday present." I didn't know how he found out about my birthday. "A gift before dying."

I looked up quickly. "You're dying?"

The Aurors shared a look full of alarm and meaning that I could only guess at.

My father laughed mirthlessly. "Merely a figure of speech. You'll learn, of course. You'll be going to school this year."

If I'd had any doubt left, that was the end of it. I was going to Hogwarts. I was going to be a wizard. I nodded.

"Excellent." My father leaned back in his chair. "Well, I have a confession to make. But it must be absolutely our secret. You must never breathe a word of it to anyone."

"What about them?" I motioned towards the Aurors.

"They wouldn't know who to tell. Now."

I leaned towards him.

"You see, I've always been fascinated with science. Science built cities, spacecraft, and the atomic bomb. And what has magic built? Trinkets and drafty castles and vanishing houses. More could be done with magic, of course, but that more never seems to happen." He smiled at me. "Perhaps you'll be the one to show the wizarding world how to dream."

"Is that your confession?"

"Here's a riddle for you: what's the worst lie a man can tell his son?"

I thought of all the terrible lies the members of the Wednesday afternoon group had been told by their incarcerated parents, but nothing came immediately to the forefront.

My father rose, too quickly for the Aurors, and came to stand over me. I stared up at him helplessly.

"I love you," he said and patted my head.

Then the tension in the room broke. Someone was pulling me away, and I grabbed the book on the table, the gift from my father. The last thing I saw, the Aurors were bearing down on him, wands drawn, as he backed away, hands up in mock submission. Then the door closed and I was hurried away.

I was quickly ushered outside by Professor Flitwick, still my guide in the wizarding world, especially the places like Azkaban that Griffith and Melissa weren't declared ready to see. From all the fuss that was being made, I gathered that I was the only one who had expected things to go badly like this.

As the Professor and I stood before the towering front gate, waiting for it to grind open, one of the Aurors who had stood in the room and watched as I met my father emerged from a side door.

"We need to see what's in that," he said sternly, indicating the leather-bound book I had taken from the interview chamber.

I turned to the Professor. "Can they do this?"

"Augustus Rookwood is a dangerous man," the Professor said. It was unnecessary for him to tell me. I had drunk of my father's poison; I knew its taste. "Whatever he wrote could help us immensely."

I clutched the book to my chest. "No." I shook my head. "No."

Everyone looked shocked. They really shouldn't have been. If they wanted the book, the first birthday present my father had ever given me, then wizarding law would have to pry it from my fingers. Only wizarding law never really took these sorts of things into account.

If I had been to a Muggle prison, there would have been no question of whether or not I was willing to give up the book. See, in the Muggle world, everyone and everything entering or leaving a prison is subject to search and seizure, no questions asked.

Of the Wednesday afternoon group, every one who still saw their parents had something taken from them by that law. Something they couldn't give their parents, or something their parents couldn't give them. It wasn't a big deal. But they'd never been asked to choose to give something up.

Because all kids love their parents. All kids want to be loved by their parents.


	2. Chapter 2

If having one or more incarcerated parents was a poker game, I had been dealt a royal flush. Not only was he kept in a forbidding wizard prison fortress on a stark island guarded by miles of sea and some sort of deep, ancient magic, but my father had been put there as a sort of war criminal, the right-hand man of Wizard Hitler. It was like the way little kids will pile all their favorite things into one nonsensical jumble, only somewhat reversed.

I would have been the envy of the Wednesday afternoon group for just that reason, if I could have told them. I did still go to the group, and tell them about meeting my father, but now, for the first time, I had a secret I had to keep from them, and a lie I had to tell in its place.

"I don't really know what my father did. They couldn't tell me. I think it had to do with some war."

That no one knew what war only seemed to make the story more believable. It's the little wars, the ones no one keeps track of, that would wind someone up in jail. If pressed, I could imply that it might have had something to do with the Irish. Finny's father had something to do with the Irish. Finny was a member of the group, a skinny girl with strawberry-blonde hair who used to get sick a lot. It got better as she got older, though.

I don't think they wanted me to keep going to the Wednesday afternoon group, Professor Flitwick and the rest. But I couldn't give it up, especially not after having met my father. Not after the marks it left on me. Not when so many in the group shared those same marks, that same pain. And to their eternal credit, Griffith and Melissa stood by me in that.

And then I went to Hogwarts.

I heard you loved Hogwarts, that for you it was not so much a second home as a first. But for me, that first year especially, going to magic school meant leaving a whole network of support and connection, and each time I returned, each vacation, each end of year, being less able to go back to it.

And of course there was the culture shock. I lived a life governed by certain concrete realities, as I think you never did, yet in the wizarding world, it seemed that no one had discovered those realities. In wizarding Britain, the school system and government are archaic, the economy Byzantine. The Middle Ages breathe from around every corner. Far from having social services, it seems that there is no concept of mental health. Now and again, you'll hear about "that which lives within our hearts" or somesuch, but no one ever seems to ask what that is or how it might benefit from certain practices.

So I found myself at Hogwarts, having left a great deal beyond the castle walls. I'm sure you remember our first meeting.

You, of course, had been the focus of a number of small scenes, whereas I had not. So when we first had class together, I was much more aware of you than you were of me. I wonder, sometimes, if you realize how the ground has been paved before your feet.

Double potions. I was getting tired of the first day of class hard sells on how important every subject is. I mean, it's magic. How hard do you have to sell a bunch of eleven-year-olds on learning magic? Quite hard, apparently.

Snape was putting you through the wringer, trying to take you down a notch. You always resented him for that, didn't you? You have to be careful what you damn someone for. You never were.

And Hermione was there, wanting the teacher's approval for reading the book and memorizing wanting the teacher's approval for reading the book and memorizing all the facts. She couldn't have imagined doing what I did. Her options were so limited. Mine weren't. I stood up and addressed the Professor.

"Excuse me, sir, but could you tell me why you're doing this?"

Everyone stared.

"I mean, is learning Potions memorizing all these recipes, or is there some other way to figure it out?"

Do you think I did it for you? I didn't do it for you.

Snape looked down at the list of names. Of course, my name meant something to him, but at the time, I thought he was just trying to decide how much scorn to address me with. Actually, he was probably doing that as well.

"Rookwood," he said, maintaining a venomous calm. "You will take your seat and refrain from interrupting class again. After dinner, you will meet me in my office."

I was still for a moment, considering pushing further. But I'd made my point, I could keep my peace and see what Snape had in store for me that evening. I sat down.

But I had been noticed. The story spread. I was no longer just another first year. I had dome something, although no one seemed to know why I had done it. And that's when Draco Malfoy took it upon himself to become acquainted with me.

He came over to me in the common room, gathering Crabbe and Goyle to loom behind him the way a girl would check her hair and put on an extra layer of lipgloss.

"You know," he said with practiced bravado, "I didn't really notice you earlier." He held out his hand and I took it. "I'm Draco Malfoy. I think our parents knew each other."

I don't know why people think wealth and aristocracy breed good manners. Every rich kid I've met has skipped straight to the most impolite things.

I dropped Draco's hand. "My father's in Azkaban."

He didn't know what to do with that, and I didn't give him any help. He struggled visibly to figure out the correct response, finally settling on a faltering "I'm… sorry."

"I live with Griffith and Melissa, my Muggle guardians," I said, to drive the point home. No one could have missed Draco's endless assertions of how proud he was to be a pureblood wizard.

That was the last straw. Draco gathered himself up and gave me a curt smile. "It's been… nice meeting you," he said and strutted off.

Draco. You never forgave him, did you, for having gotten off on the wrong foot with you? He pulled the same childish airs with me, but you have to be careful what you're willing to damn someone for, and that's not enough. Was your hatred sealed by the way he parroted his father's prejudices? But to change someone's mind, you have to give them a chance. It is natural for children to be assimilated into their parents' views. At eleven, most children haven't really learned to separate their parents' actions from their own.

And all kids really love their parents. All kids want to be loved by their parents.

In the Wednesday afternoon group, that division was necessary. We could not be allowed to take responsibility for our parents' crimes. It would have been too great a burden to bear, and there would be too great a chance that we would follow our parents down their dark path. Some would anyways, for the slightest reason, or the minute they ran out of reasons.

Then again, I had the eyes to see Draco Malfoy in a different light from the very start. I had grown up sharing scars with a group of kids whose parents were cons. I saw the patterns in others and I saw them in myself. And I saw them at Hogwarts.

I was aware that, as there had been a war, and as my father had been imprisoned for his part in it, there were likely to be other kids whose parents were also in Azkaban. And there were. I saw them. I saw the pieces of a pattern that ran through them, the habits they had fallen into to shield themselves from long-acting harm.

The thing was, I saw that same pattern running through Draco Malfoy. The way his every action played into a multi-layered, melodramatic façade. How incredibly close he kept to the line of his father's opinions.

What's the worst lie a parent can tell their child? I love you.

How often had Draco Malfoy heard that lie? Had it been whispered to him every night as he lay down to sleep? And how deeply did he suspect it to be a lie? He tried so hard to make it true.

All kids really love their parents. All kids want to be loved by their parents.


	3. Chapter 3

That evening, I went to see Snape in his office. He sat behind his desk, gazing over steepled fingers to where I stood before him.

At long last he said, "So you are the first-year boy who wants to learn magic?"

"Yes!"

He hesitated. I am fairly sure he had a speech prepared, a whole bitter litany of discouragement and all the reasons I should never attempt to make a serious study of magic. If I'd been from any House but his, he probably would've gone through with it. He probably would've with most students from his own house too, come to think of it.

I think he was struck by the absurdity of the situation: a teacher encouraging a student not to learn. And he did try to be a teacher.

Instead, he told me, "Then I will teach you."

So while you were practicing to be the star of the Gryffindor Quiditch team, I was taking private lessons with the teacher most loathed and feared of any of the long-term staff, learning the real fundamentals of magic that you never bothered to learn and that Hogwarts never bothered to teach.

Do you think Snape spared me any of his bitterness? He didn't. He parsed out the speech he refrained from giving me that first evening over the course of an entire year, possibly more, in snide comments and insinuations. That first year, there were days when he would teach me, and days when he would try to break my spirit.

But I was strong in certain ways, ways no eleven-year-old should've been. I had a bone-deep stubbornness and no expectation of or dependence on any kindness or encouragement. If I hadn't, I'd have broken down, and Snape would've hated me for it.

Those first years, I made it a habit to ask myself, are we having an adventure yet? Big old castle, mysterious mentor figures, bloody magic, you'd have thought there would have been classic adventure stories lurking around every corner. And there were for you, weren't there?

Only, if I had an adventure, what part would I play? You were the hero, obviously, but I didn't want to be the villain, and I didn't want to be one of the million unimportant townsfolk, living lives of little significance to anyone. And those were really the only roles I could think of, then.

Were we having an adventure yet? No.

My father, no longer the invisible figure he'd been before I'd met him, found his way into my life at school. From time to time, he would conspire to send my packages, often through a third party I had never met, and to make sizeable deposits in addition to the small but reasonable sum that Griffith and Melissa had made available to me in a Gringotts account.

There were times, I admit, when I began to indulge in the fantasy that Augustus Rookwood was only in Azkaban because he had some purpose there, and might one day appear in all his terrible might at my door and take me under his wing like the good son that I really was. But my father could play the system masterfully, not control it. And he wasn't the sort to care for a child.

But all kids really love their parents. All kids want to be loved by their parents.

One time, when Snape came late for our regularly scheduled contest of wills, I saw he was limping.

"Are you alright?" I asked. "Sir?"

He glared at me contemptuously, so I felt the need to clarify.

"I know first aid," I offered.

They had taught us once, as a special extension of the Wednesday afternoon group. It was a means of empowerment, of coping with the fear that something could go horribly wrong at any moment: if something did go horribly wrong, we would know of something constructive to do, something to minimize the damage.

Of course, Snape didn't know what first aid was, so I explained, badly, reciting everything we'd been taught. He listened impatiently, telling me curtly, "It's been taken care of," at the first break in my rambling.

Being told that everything is fine like that when you're worried about someone really only makes you worry more. So while Snape tried to get on with things, I was distracted, fidgeting constantly. At last, he noticed my inability and guessed why it was.

"There is magical healing, Rookwood. It is incredibly powerful, but it takes time." His tone was unchanged, but the words were an act of mercy.

"Will you teach me that?" I asked.

"If you can manage to learn the most basic fundamentals of magic, yes. Now," and he launched into a caustic explanation of Gamp's Law of Elemental Transfiguration and its five Principal Exceptions.

After that night, Snape still tried to discourage me from learning magic, but it was a token effort. To him, I had proved myself damaged enough to be past his ability to harm, so he could trust himself with me.

He was wrong, of course. What I had really demonstrated was that most affected by his pain. Had he realize that, he would have known that I would pay for it if he let me get any closer. I don't regret it, but he would have.

The year's end was uneventful for me, as it wasn't for you. Sometimes, wonder if your annual adventures did you some real harm: all that heroism and powerful magic. Maybe you forgot the value of the ordinary, the day-to-day. I wouldn't be surprised if you thought you could solve any problem with a climactic confrontation.

Toward the end of the year, I'd noticed that in my lessons with Snape, there was math. Ordinary, Muggle math. Not just in Arithmancy, it was everywhere. Adjusting spells for certain weather conditions or seasons, working out the amounts for potion ingredients, and I don't even know how Astronomy was even taught to the rest of the school, I stopped paying any attention after about second year, it got so helplessly garbled. And it wasn't handled very well anywhere. There's nothing quite like reading some old warlock go on about a long-winded explanation of a fairly basic polynomial expression.

You know, before that I hadn't noticed much, that most wizarding families don't really provide their children with much education. The entire school system is one seven-year program. We don't learn reading, writing, art, logic, or math or any kind. We only learn the history of magic, not the history of everything else, and at Hogwarts, it's taught by a ghost. Can ghosts really even think? Binns never gave any sign of it, that's for sure.

I didn't want my hard-won study to be hampered by some old wizard not knowing how to work a simple calculation, but I knew it wouldn't be long before the calculations were out of my depth. So I decided to get some basic math textbooks and learn on my own.

Textbooks aren't cheap, though, especially Muggle textbooks, since mostly they're not sold to students. I didn't want to ask Griffith and Melissa to pay for more than what was required by the school. But, as I've mentioned, my father had seen to it that I had funds to buy all the things befitting a young gentleman. I was not that young gentleman, so by the end of the first year, I hadn't found much to do with the money. Paying for a textbook or two shouldn't have been a problem.

Only it turns out that Gringotts doesn't keep Muggle money around, so you can exchange Muggle money for wizard gold, but not the other way round. I was handed off from teller to manager, until finally an aged goblin who was probably in charge of a sizeable chunk of the bank's operations told me that they don't trust paper money, and there isn't a big enough demand for it, so the bank finds ways to get rid of it as soon as they can.

"Most wizards don't want Muggle things," he said, giving me a keen look over his wire-rimmed glasses. "Wouldn't have a use for them."

I was about to give up, frustrated, when on my way out I met Hermione Granger and her parents, obvious outsiders. What must they have thought of me, frantically and adamantly trying to buy the money they intended to exchange, offering twice as much as the bank would give them? And Hermione, who I'd hardly said a word to all year, what did she think?

Mr. and Mrs. Granger wanted to know what I was up to, of course, so I told them.

"There's things, see, like math, that wizards aren't good at. It turns up in magic, but they're not good at it."

The Grangers shared a look as I stood there, biting my lip and trying not to fidget. I think it was the start of something, a seed of doubt watered where it might have shriveled and died. Mr. Granger smiled and patted me on the shoulder in that vaguely concerned way parents have with other people's kids.

"How about you stick with us, and later on we can all go to a bookshop together? It sounds like Hermione could use some extra books as well."

And that's how, when you and the Weasleys met up with the Grangers, I was hanging just outside their little familial cluster. And why, as you and your friends hurried about Diagon Alley getting your school things, I tagged along, an outsider told to join the group by adults.

You remember that day, don't you? Back when the cracks in our world were only just barely visible to you, the Dark Lord an amorphous threat to be fought with adventure and bravery. But it was never that to me. To those of us who were the children of war criminals, to Finny and I, that half-forgotten conflict, never really spoken of to children, was a swath of destruction that cut through every landscape. The cracks in your world were barely visible. My world was already broken.

"A while ago, you see, there was a man, a wizard. He wanted, well… he tried to take over Wizarding Britain. A lot of people died."

The atrocities of men are born in the dreams of children.

If my father, then why not me? It didn't matter that I had hardly met the man, or that I didn't know why my father did what he did, or that I didn't even know what the war was about.

All children really love their parents. All children want to be loved by their parents.


	4. Chapter 4

I saw my father again that summer, the meeting as ill-advised and I as ill-prepared for it as ever. We sat in the same room, on opposite sides of the same table. The place had already crept into the unseen corners of my mind, and now it was a pattern. I was a year older. Different Aurors were on guard. Aside from that, nothing had changed.

He smiled when he saw me.

"Ah, Nathaniel," he said. "Have you read the memoir I gave you last year?"

It was the little, leather-bound book. I had. The only remarkable thing about it was how incredibly little it revealed. I nodded.

"Perhaps you should read it again. A good book is always better on the second reading. Or even the seventh."

That alarmed the Aurors, though I didn't know why.

"You know, my father said, "I went to school with the Dark Lord himself, though of course he wasn't known as such. I was the one who found him."

The Aurors were hanging on his every word now, and he drew my attention to them with a nod. I looked over my shoulder as he indicated.

"So," he said, reclaiming my attention immediately, "how have you been doing in school?"

"I've been having lessons with a teacher. Professor Snape. It's how I've been learning magic most."

"Severus Snape, was it?"

I nodded.

"Yes, he was quite talented. And rarely recognized, a resource left untapped. You will do well indeed to make use of him."

My heart thrilled at the thought that my father and I had both seen the same unrealized potential. Even the black-hooded wardens of Azkaban could not take that happiness from me, it was so desperate.

"And your other classes?" he asked.

I went through my classes one by one, telling him everything I'd learned and everything the other teachers hadn't taught me about their subjects. I would have done anything to see that spark of pride in my father's eyes as he watched me, that fierce triumph. As frigid as his smile was, it meant the world to me.

All children really love their parents. All children want to be loved by their parents.

When our time together was coming to a close, he rose slowly and carefully from his seat, unfolding his wiry frame meticulously. The Aurors tensed but made no move to stop him. He walked over to me and patted my head, just like he had the first time I'd met him, a year earlier.

What's the worst lie a parent can tell their child? I love you.

Then the visit was over, luckily without the chaotic brutality of the first one. It still left its mark, though, and I still depended on the Wednesday afternoon group to help me deal with it and forge it into an understanding.

But the rift between me and the rest of the group was widening. It's important in a setting like that not to try to keep any secrets, and I had secrets that I was forbidden from telling by the aptly, named Statute of Secrecy.

I tried not to make it matter, but I was always asking myself, how do I talk about this thing? Is this particular lie one that I can maintain? Am I being as honest as I possibly can? And it distracted me from being fully present in the group.

That's when I started talking to Finny. She was just one person, as damaged and imperfect as any of us, and she didn't hold me to such a high standard of honesty and candidness. Besides, we had something in common: our fathers were in prison because of a war. She thought it was the same war, and while I knew differently, I found that it didn't matter terribly much. Everything else, everything important, I could tell her.

When I returned to school that second year, I found that little had changed, save for Hermione Granger having suddenly taken an interest in me. That day in Diagon Alley, she must have realized that I was as avid a learner as she herself was, and that my unremarkable performance in class was balanced by some knowledge to which she now wanted access.

Did you think she and I were natural allies? Any outsider might have done so. The two students who worked hardest in their studies, there was no reason we shouldn't have been close friends.

But the truth was, we were more different than we were alike. She wanted the glory of recognition in academic success, and I wanted the obvious power of being the biggest magical badass out there. Neither of these desires were particularly noble, but don't you dare think less of either of us for that. It's important to want things for yourself, or else you can't want the right things for others.

And you have to be careful what you damn someone for.

You remember the way Hermione was about Lockheart? Actually, I doubt Weasley ever let her live it down. But I don't think you ever realized what it meant to her.

She thought she'd found a kindred spirit, someone who had everything she wanted—recognition, even adoration—and had gotten it by being smart. It was only natural that she fit those feelings into the pattern of an adolescent girl's first crush. Even when she started to doubt how genuine he really was, she kept going on and on about him when we would study together, and I knew well enough to keep quiet and listen. You know, I think she actually cried when he was revealed to be nothing more than a fraud.

For all the commotion that year, the dissent that shook the school only reached me in echoes. The day after Draco called her a Mudblood, for instance, Hermione was still bothered about the incident.

"The way they go on about it…" she began, then looked up and realized that I wore Slytherin colors. " I mean, not you, of course. I don't know why, but—"

I cut her off. "There's Muggleborn Slytherins, you know."

"I didn't realize… You wouldn't think…"

"They're very quiet. It worries me. One of them might bring a load of guns, one day, and shoot up the school."

"A gun wouldn't fire on Hogwarts grounds," she said compulsively.

I could only stare for a moment, struck literally dumb. I don't think I've ever seen someone miss the point so badly. Finally, I recovered.

"I know you're very smart, but that is probably the stupidest thing I've ever heard."

And it was, even coming form someone who was subject to Draco's endless insecure posturing.

Would a gun fire on Hogwarts grounds?

Nonetheless, I was curious enough to ask Snape when next I went to private lessons with him. He looked down at me with a hint of surprised dismay.

"That is not the matter at hand, Rookwood, as you well know."

The whole school was anxious and preoccupied. Everyone had heard of how History of Magic classes were being derailed by students wanting to know about the thought-to-be-mythical Chamber of Secrets, and stricter teachers, Snape among them, were developing a habit of keeping intensely close control over class discussions to prevent such mutinies.

So I was hardly surprised that his first impulse was to dismiss my inquiry. But a week later, he brought up the subject.

"The interaction between magic and Muggle technology is a complex and deeply layered subject. It is clear that there is some disturbance of technology by magic, and that the reverse is not also true. Professor Burbage, who teaches Muggle Studies, would be able to elaborate somewhat on what I have said. However, the truth is that very little academic investigation has been done on the subject."

He paused, partially as dramatic convention dictated and partially, I think, to decide whether or not to continue. Ultimately, his role as a teacher won out over his penchant for secrecy.

"You see, we do not actually understand what magic is or how it works. We cannot take it apart and glimpse the mechanism by which it works. We can only even circumscribe its boundaries by finding that which is invisible to the greater part of the world in all but its most concrete effects."

All of the other things I ascribe as being said by someone or other are guesses, pulled from memories that are less than perfect. But this is word for word. I copied it down exactly that night and wrote it inside the covers of all of my schoolbooks at the beginning of each year.

It is something we should have known. At the start of each year, instead of his idiomatic antics, Dumbledore should have stood before the Great Hall and told us, "You stand now at the edge of uncertainty. In the coming year, you will plunge into it." But no one ever told you.

I asked Snape, "Does it bother you?"

He turned his attention slightly away from me. "That is irrelevant."

We dropped that line of inquiry.

I did re-read my father's memoir. Many times, in fact, each more unremarkable than the last. Then, finally, I noticed it: a short string of letters near the middle that had no apparent meaning; a number of inconsistent spelling errors; the erratic spacing of a certain section. He could have done it perfectly, I think, but I might not have been able to find it. It was a code. Or rather, it was a whole mess of codes.

And then the purpose of my father's passed-on lessons became clear. He wanted me, and me alone, (for if there is any study less common to wizards than math, it is cryptology) to have the contents of this book. So I worked at it day and night, almost at severe detriment to my other studies.

All children really love their parents. All children want to be loved by their parents.

And I do think that my father loved me, even then. He was never good with kids; in others, he valued logic and capability above all else, and children are hardly logical or capable. But he tried, in many ways, to make me something to be proud of. And if it had come to it, I know he would have done anything to save me.


	5. Chapter 5

When I was finished with a certain part, a spell, the first complete instruction I had decoded, with no references to anything I hadn't found yet, I took it directly to Snape at our next lesson. The minute he glanced it, he fixed me with a harsh, focused gaze.

"Where did you get this?"

I didn't answer. He stepped forward, my decoded page clutched in his hand.

"Where did you get this?" he demanded once more.

I clenched my jaw, remaining silent. He raised the page, and I thought for a moment that he would strike me. Then he turned with a sweeping motion, strode over to the fireplace, and threw the page in.

That could have been the end of it. I could have cried or raged—that was the only copy of that decrypted page. But it wouldn't have been worth it. I stood motionless, imagining that it was my own frustration being consumed by the fire. I had decrypted it once, I told myself, I could do it again.

You have to be careful what you damn someone for.

When the page had been reduced to ash, Snape turned to me and spoke. "Do not seek out the Dark Arts, Rookwood. I will not conceal from you their existence, and there will come a time when you must understand them, but that time has not come yet. The thing that defines the Dark Arts is that they require a price and that the price is always too high."

As he finished, the anger went out of his voice and something else crept in, and unspeakable exhaustion and anguish. I knew to keep quiet—Snape would hardly have relished being called out in a moment of vulnerability, and his defensive impulses were quick and often cruel. When at last the silence was broken, he was the one to speak.

"Now, on the matter of the Heribidean Matrix—"

"I'm sorry," I said, leaving it intentionally ambiguous whether I meant about the decrypted spell or about whatever price he had paid.

He paused for a moment, the lack of reproach as great a sign of gratitude as he could show me. Then he turned our attention once more to the Heribidean Organizational Matrix (invented by Elric Heribide) and its role in understanding how various spells and types of magic relate to one another. Or at least, how they might do so, as there are many exceptions to and problems with the Heribidean Matrix, as there is with any more theoretical tool for understanding magic.

There is a place in the Matrix, of course, for the Dark Arts. A number of places, actually, spread across the various Disciplines, Aspects, Objects, and Transitories. There is some speculation, in the limited circle that has ever heard of the Heribidean Organizational Matrix, that Heribide began to conceive of the Matrix first as a means of defining exactly what comprised the Dark Arts. And, in this regard, it seems to be a fairly good tool of measurement, yet it remains obscure.

It has occurred to me, chillingly, that Dumbledore must have been farmiliar with the Heribidean Matrix, yet he did not encourage teachers to use it at Hogwarts. I suspect it was a matter of his trying to fight a war and run a school at the same time: he was more concerned that we lack the tools to do harm than that we be instilled with a sense of morality.

When I mentioned this suspension to Snape, he said, quietly, "He takes the body who cannot claim the soul." Then he told me, sharply, that it was hardly a good idea to criticize Albus Dumbledore.

My own knowledge of the Heribidean Matrix, however, lead me to a conclusion which I wish had been more startling. As I decoded the spells hidden in my father's memoir, one after the next fell squarely within the areas of the Matrix allotted to the Dark Arts. If ever anyone had questioned Augustus Rookwood's erudition on the subject, this was the proof of it. Yet I told no one. And I continued to decode it.

All children really love their parents. All children want to be loved by their parents.

That summer, I started spending most of my time out of the house, wandering the streets of London. Sometimes I was alone, often I was with Finny. I got into a couple fights, but otherwise I kept out of trouble. Griffith and Melissa didn't worry too much: I always made Wednesday group, I was back every night when I said I would be, and they could see that I was keeping up with my studies.

Towards the end of the summer, I had the annual meeting with my father in the then-familiar room with the then-familiar air created by the then-familiar torments of Azkaban's barbaric practices.

With Sirius Black a fugitive, and the resultant increase in security, there had been some question as to whether I would even be allowed to see my father, and any attempts to brighten the visiting chamber had been abolished. Rather than the usual pair of Aurors, the room was watched by three Aurors and a Dementor was stationed just outside the door.

My father, however, was completely unchanged, his features giving no clue as to what he thought of Black's escape. Before I could so much as utter a single word in greeting, he raised his hand to silence me.

"It would be unwise, I think, to speak of recent events."

He looked to one of the Aurors, and she nodded with grudging assent.

I settled into my seat anxiously, keenly aware of the tension in the room. We talked, with false nonchalance—badly feigned on my part—of my studies and very little else. I did not mention that a Basilisk had been set loose in Hogwarts the preceding year, or a threat to the lives of Mugglborns painted on a wall in blood. He gave no hint as to whom he might or might not have known or what he might or might not have done in his past life. Even any mention of Severus Snape was kept to a bare minimum.

"I'm glad you seem to be taking full advantage of his expertise," my father said, and I realized that I should say no more on the subject.

I do not know how my father retained such a clam and amiable demeanor in the midst of Azkaban's horrors. I glimpsed for the first time, that day, the full depth of cruelty which wizarding Britain employed in the punishment of its prisoners, and I was shaken by it. I thought, sometimes, that my father must have had some talisman to protect him, though such magic was obviously forbidden.

It helped to think that, anyways, and so from time to time I would tell myself it was true. The conditions in prisons came up often in Wednesday group. Sometimes they would be reduced to tears recounting the terrible things their parents had been through. Deserved or not, it was impossible not to abhor such suffering when seen under those circumstances.

All children really love their parents. All children want to be loved by their parents.

There was always a difficult discussion of blame. As hard as it was for us to accept, and whether the severity was fair or unfair, our parents had, at least in part, brought it upon themselves. We could hate the system for its cruelty, we were told, but we could never, ever allow that hate to bleed into places where it was undeserved.

The atrocities of men are born in the dreams of children.

And, in accepting our parents' complicity in their own suffering and their separation from us, we learned that hating them didn't diminish our love for them. We were not wrong for resenting them, and it only hurt us more when we pretended that we didn't, or that we only resented them.

I wanted my father to be proud of me. I wanted him to see me do all the things he would have done in my place, just short of being imprisoned. I worked tirelessly to decode his memoir. It was a mistake. I knew it was a mistake, but I did it anyways. It was something we had to be wary of, they told us in the Wednesday group, the desire to emulate our parents' mistakes. And for me it was doubly so. My father was a brilliant man, and it was hard to tell where the brilliance ended and the mistakes started.

That day in Azkaban, I began to see that I was too kind for my father's tastes. To him, Snape was a resource and nothing more. Yet what glimpses I had seen of Snape's agonized self-loathing had awakened my deepest sympathies, and I had acted on them.

Are we having an adventure yet?

In a classic heroic confrontation, there aren't two roles, hero and villain. There's three: victim, aggressor, and rescuer. No one in the wizarding world had the guts to ask me to be a rescuer, and so I was pulled, by example, between victim and aggressor. But every kid is a hero in their own mind. Maybe I wasn't quite ready to give that up.

When Draco's arm got torn open, for instance, I went through the whole First Aid routine without even really thinking about it. First step, check to see that no one is more qualified than you. It's absurd that we have a Professor teaching an accident-prone subject to accident-prone kids, and that Professor doesn't know the first thing about healing magic.

Step two, send for help. Usually, you pick a likely helper and tell them, "You, go call for an ambulance," but Hogwarts is rather short on emergency services, so I had to settle for telling Miss Parkinson to get Professor Sprout, who was likely to be closest by and who I hoped would have some inkling of magical healing.

Step three, check to see that the victim is conscious. Draco was sitting up, shaking and whimpering in pain and terror, so step three was easy.

Step four, stop the bleeding. I was only entirely aware after the fact that I had torn strips from my own robe to wrap the injury. At the time, it was only a matter of what was close at hand. It's not like Professor Hagrid kept a first aid kit about.

I was just getting to step five, treat for shock, when Miss Parkinson came racing back with Professor Sprout. I was about to surrender control of the situation to someone who I hoped would have greater expertise when I realized that Hermione Granger was shouting, "Get out of there!"

I half-rose, then the blow struck me on the shoulder and I staggered under it. I turned around, mind racing, getting ready for a fight, and I saw Professor Hagrid struggling to pull an angry Hippogriff away. Someone grabbed my arm—was it you?—and Draco and I were pulled to safety.

At first, I tried to insist that I was fine, just coming down from the adrenaline. My shoulder was bleeding, ripped almost to the bone in one spot, but you know? For the first few minutes, I didn't feel it. Pain just works that way.

See, step zero of first aid is to check to see if the scene is safe before rushing in and making more victims. But just ask someone to imagine that they're performing first aid ("You see a man lying on the ground.") and they'll forget that step. In a real emergency situation, you're not even thinking, just doing, and most people don't do step zero.


	6. Chapter 6

Even having screwed up and gotten hurt, rushing to Draco's rescue earned me popularity in certain quarters, Lucius Malfoy among them. When he came to Hogwarts, several days after his son recovered, to lay the framework for the various legal actions he planned to take, he sent a message ahead saying the he wanted to speak with me. We met in Snape's office, later in the afternoon.

I was not much inclined to like Lucius Malfoy. Annoying as his son's manner was, I never forgot my suspicions that it was a reaction to his father's cruel indifference. My first encounter with the man only confirmed that possibility.

He dressed immaculately and conspicuously, even though the only meetings he had that day were with schoolchildren. He barely spoke a word to Snape, who glanced quickly to me as he absented himself in a gesture equal parts tact and submission. And though Lucius Malfoy never specifically mentioned my father on his own, he made constant references to my heritage.

"So, Master Rookwood, it would seem that my family owes yours a debt of gratitude for having aided my son at great risk to yourself."

To this day, I take pride in the memory of the resentful glare I fixed him with.

"I screwed up. So did he. Neither of us would have gotten hurt otherwise."

His falsely indulgent smile might've been a lot more chilling if I hadn't been getting used to my father's icy expressions.

"You are merely, how old exactly? Thirteen? No one would expect children of that age to act flawlessly. To fault you would be in error."

Lucius Malfoy always sounded like a politician. Never a specific where a generality could go. Never admitting wrongdoing on the part of himself or his allies, even when it didn't matter. So I decided to see what he had to say about my father.

"I hear you knew my father," I began, doing a bad job of faking well-intended interest, "but he's never mentioned you when I visit him in Azkaban."

In retrospect, it wasn't wise to provoke Lucius Malfoy. He was still powerful back then, and I was vulnerable to the kinds of power he wielded. But sod it, I wasn't going to grovel to some asshole.

"Azkaban really is a terrible place, isn't it? It's a pity about having the guards here, but with Black on the loose, I'm afraid it's a matter of security."

"What was my father like, back when you knew him?"

He wasn't even subtle about refusing to answer my questions.

"I'm afraid that I'm running a bit late. We'll have to talk about that another time. I'm terribly sorry."

He gave me another fake smile, this one apologetic, and although he made a great show of being effusively thankful in his parting, he never really met my eyes after that.

It wasn't really good practice, we were often reminded, to use incarcerated parents as an excuse for our behavior or a means of alienating others. But things were different with Lucius Malfoy. He knew, and I reminded him, that he had earned a place by my father's side in Azkaban. And try as he might, he could only occasionally believe the lies he told to secure his freedom.

But even the irreverent way I'd treated Lucius Malfoy wasn't enough for Hermione Granger. I was failing to align myself with what she though was the righteous side of important issues, and she was figuring out that I wasn't about to pass everything I was learning with Snape on to her secondhand. She never said anything, but I could tell she was losing interest in my company.

You have to be careful what you damn someone for.

But over the course of third year, she and I still spent a good deal of time together, especially when she and Weasley fell out. I never fought with her, though we disagreed on lots of things.

Among the topics on which we differed was the matter of Professor Lupin. She and I were both perfectly aware, after Snape's substitute lesson on the topic, that Professor Lupin was a werewolf. She was infuriated by the obviousness of Snape's lesson.

"How dare he…" she fumed, as we worked on the homework he had assigned.

Snape had an incredible ability to keep secrets, and he was often amazingly charitable in his use of this skill, though the very nature of the deed meant he would almost certainly never get any thanks. That he had come so close to breaking confidence alarmed me. I was sure there was a reason.

"It hasn't been handled well," I told her, guessing vainly at Snape's purpose. "We might be in danger, and we weren't even told."

"That's just the sort of thing people say about werewolves," she said, crossing her arms over her chest and giving me a warning look, "and then they're horrible about it. Obviously, Dumbledore's taken precautions."

As if she knew what sort of things people say about werewolves. Hermione Granger was as much a stranger to the wizarding world as me. And of course she trusted Dumbledore to take care of these things. If I'd felt kinder towards Professor Lupin, I could've brought up that maybe it wasn't the nicest thing for Dumbldore to put him in a position where he had to keep quiet about what he really was.

"Then we should've been told about it, so we could decide for ourselves. Or our parents should've."

We left it at that, having encountered the point of disagreement. What's more, I was drawing from information I knew I couldn't share.

Snape was afraid of Lupin. To most of the school, it must have looked like hatred. Resentment for the man who got the job Snape wanted, or maybe an old grudge. But I knew Snape, maybe better than anyone, and I saw when he let his guard down. He was afraid, in a half-buried, residual way, not of a thing that might happen. It was something that had already happened, a long time ago.

The atrocities of men are born in the dreams of children.

When I regarded Professor Lupin with mistrust, it was because I knew he had done something horrible to earn Snape's fear. But Hermione Granger always wanted to leap to the aid of the disenfranchised. She saw in me the prejudice of others.

You have to be careful what you damn someone for.

I was still taking lessons with Snape, and we had begun to encounter certain topics which, I was informed, would likely be tested in OWLs. I don't think it was a matter of my being spectacularly talented. I'm not a particularly powerful spell caster. I just learned the material in a logical order and with the aid of a growing knowledge of Muggle things, subjects that were much more helpful in my study of magic than the wizarding world seemed to think they would be.

When Snape taught me healing magic, as he had said he would, a basic understanding of biology proved to be immensely useful. Of course, biology being an aspect of Muggle science, it wasn't taught at Hogwarts, and the typical Hogwarts graduate's ignorance of anatomy is second only to the medieval concept of the four humors. My self-fostered knowledge of the subject, rudimentary as it was, gave me a huge advantage. Snape noticed.


	7. Chapter 7

The third-year Slytherin class didn't encounger a boggart in our first lesson with Professor Lupin. We covered the topic later in the year. Sometimes, thinking back to that day, I wonder if the Professor didn't fear the forms the boggart would take for us more than we ourselves did. Draco, true to form, concocted a story to get out of class, though it takes no great feat of imagination to guess what he would have seen.

Lacking the dumb courage of Gryffindor house—either facing one's fear or not having much to fear in the first place—our class flagged. Crabbe and Goyle both botched the incantation, the boggart took truly monstrous forms for a couple of students, and Pansy Parkinson broke into tears when it took for her the form of a mirror that subtly deformed her reflection into something grotesque and filled the air with contemptuous whispers.

The atrocities of men are born in the dreams of children.

I got the feeling that the Professor was depending, ruefully, on my concrete skill and practiced calm to see that the lesson wasn't a real cock-up, and called on me near the end of class. I wasn't sure, when I stepped forward, what form the boggart would take. A number of things had come to mind. Dementors, Finny dead in a hospital, being thrown out of the Wednesday afternoon group. But I wasn't really clear on what rules governed a boggart's shape.

When Professor Lupin called me forward, Crabbe's many-limbed horror (the eventually-produced polka dot bows didn't help much) vanished and became a familiar leather-bound notebook sitting upon a dark seat that looked rather like a throne. I raised my wand, trying to think of what would make this image safer. Some comedic aspect of the situation other than the pitch-black irony of it. Then I stopped.

"Excuse me, sir?"

Professor Lupin seemed rather surprised that I wanted to ask a question, not least because I rarely spoke in his class.

"Yes, Rookwood?"

"Is this all? I mean, sir, can it do anything to hurt me?"

From the corner of the room she had retreated to, Parkinson sobbed, "Kill it, kill it, kill it!"

Professor Lupin gave me a curious look. "All, Rookwood? It is a manifestation of your greatest fear."

"Yeah, and it's just sitting there," I said, waving at the very inanimate book and chair. "It's not hurting anyone."

"Sometimes, fear is the greatest form of harm that can be done," the Professor said, with his shallow affect of wisdom.

I considered arguing the point for a moment, maybe bringing up the notion that there are things worth fearing, or that letting fear harm you is mostly a matter of dealing with it badly, but I decided it wasn't worth it.

Instead, I pointed at the boggart's image. "That's not fear. It's not even a thing I fear. It's a magical creature pretending to be a thing I fear. And you know what? It's good to know. It can't hurt me and it's good to know."

"Rookwood, if we could proceed with the lesson-"

"What, kill it? Why? Aside from how useful it could be, it's not dangerous, just trying to be frightening. And do you really want to tell us to kill things just because we're afraid of them?"

You have to be careful what you damn someone for.

And in that same textbook that instructed us on what to do if we encountered a boggart there was a whole section on how to kill werewolves. That textbook, for third-year students, that Professor Lupin assigned, on how to kill anything you find threatening. How many people had to think that was a good idea? How many people had to think nothing of it?

Even knowing it was a part of what the boggart had shown me, I kept decoding my father's diary. Neither the book nor the spells it contained were going to do any harm on their own, and I wasn't going to go about using them just because they were there.

The school year drew once more to a close, with yet another climactic confrontation for you and nothing of the sort for me, aside from another brief spat with Professor Lupin about the ethics of boggart-killing, for which he docked me points on the final. If I said that I grieved over his resignation, near-involuntary though it was, I would be lying.

In my last meeting with Snape before departing, I finally dared to ask him about Professor Lupin.

"Why do you hate him so much?" I knew better than to say "fear."

Though he didn't lash out, Snape was immediately defensive. "It would be unseemly for me to regard a colleague, as Professor Lupin has been, with undue animosity."

"He earned it, then, because you aren't like that with other people."

"My suspicions regarding Professor Lupin's involvement with the fugitive Sirius Black have been deemed insubstantial."

I hesitated, reflecting on the situation and wondering if Snape's trust in me was strong enough to endure more questions. He was deferring to a higher, absent sense of authority- the proper form of conduct for a teacher- to avoid his own, personal reasons for fearing Lupin, and to avoid that fear itself. It was a thing he did often, and I knew that as long as I allowed him to end discussions in that way, he would.

"My father never said anything about Sirius Black. I'm not sure he was even a Death Eater. Does it even matter? Would you even care?"

It was a risk to say, but effectively disarming.

"He was an incredibly cruel young man, in school. All three of them were."

I'm not sure whether he was trying to answer my question or convince me that it was nothing personal. I don't think he even knew. And although he being completely honest with me, it wasn't really me he was talking to.

"I can't even tell you what they did. And the worst part is, they never even realized it."

He had, instinctively, wrapped an arm protectively around his chest. He looked so vulnerable at that moment, I felt compelled to reach out to him, to feel the solidness of his shoulder and convey by the pressure of my fingers all the wordless concern and compassion that I felt. But the moment was fleeting, and before I could make a move, he had squared his shoulders and become once more inaccessible.

"You are aware of the significance of the name 'Death Eaters'?" he asked, shifting the focus to a detail of what I had said earlier.

"You know my father's Augustus Rookwood," I reminded him.

"I do not think it should be necessary for me to mention the danger in emulating a great deal of his behavior."

"I know."

He stared critically into the middle distance, at a space slightly above and aside from my left elbow, his expression inscrutable.

"It would be impossible, of course, for one such as myself-"

Neither of us could have bared to hear what he had started to say, that he was both in no position to and incapable of replacing my father.

"I know." It came out harsher than I meant, so I said it again, softer. "I know." I paused on my way out the door, half-turning to say, "Goodbye, Professor."

Then began the dark days of summer.


End file.
